On Striving

What is it that drives us? What is it that we are driven towards? Why must we always be driven towards/by this or that?

Why is it important to ask these questions?

If one wants to understand themselves and their act of living, then perhaps one of the first places to begin would be to understand one’s pursuits in life and the forces or the motivations that shape/guide these pursuits.

Seeking the sustenance of the physical organism is probably the most fundamental force that drives our actions. Anything that threatens our physical existence must be avoided/overcome.

But once that question is resolved i.e., one’s physical survival is not under any immediate threat, what after that?

A certain striving seems to underpin all our efforts in life. This striving could be towards material or non-material objective, but there definitely is the impulse to attain something that is missing or not enough at the moment, to fix something that is not as it should be, to become something that one is not, all according the personal image of how it should be.

Essentially our entire act of living is this striving- like chasing the horizon that is always in sight but always unreachable.

On the surface we pursue wealth, fame, power, knowledge, companionship, justice, equality, political, economic, social and cultural revolutions, creation of a ‘better’ world, peace, freedom, salvation, God and so on. Broadly speaking, all these pursuits are built on the idea that once the object of such a pursuit is achieved, one would be happier, more complete, more fulfilled etc. In other words, only once things are as they should be, there would be happiness.

A pursuit of any kind involves moving from one point to the other. In this case, it is the movement from what is (i.e. the actuality-the world/life as it is) to what should be (the ideal- the world/life as it should be).

Striving is as much an escape from what is, as it is the pursuit of what should be.

The ideal image of how things ought to be is the way we try to impose known upon unknown, in order to make the act of living more predictable, more comprehensible, less complex, and hence less terrifying.To be stuck with unknown is terrifying, the pursuit of the known is what seems to give a so-called meaning to life. So we create fixed ideas, ideologies, belief systems, norms, frameworks etc. i.e. the known- all of which reflect our half baked, overly simplistic and forever partial perception of the world and our relationship with it. They become convenient (but always insufficient) substitutes for facing, staying with and inquiring into the immense complexity of the world and oneself.

We end up spending our entire lives in the confines of the knowledge we have created, and knowledge that seems vast and limitless but in truth is always limited and incomplete, no matter how much we expand it. In other words we choose to dwell in a world of our own making, one that exists solely inside our heads, all in order to avoid/escape the actual world as it is. The more one accepts and throws oneself into striving as way of living, the more one is considered to be well-adjusted or adapted to the world.

What are the implications of such striving?

Striving, as an idea of escape from the terrifying, mysterious unknowable world is our greatest pleasure.

A child must feel a stifling sense of inadequacy- physically, intellectually, emotionally and in all other ways, to survive in and navigate a world that is so strange, so unpredictable i.e. not just the natural world, but also the social, cultural and technological world- the world built upon knowledge. So once the fundamental physical needs are taken care of then growing up essentially is an act of adjusting to this knowledge world, to find succour and pleasure in its familiarity.

Slowly, the child begins to learn the ways of this world through observation, imitation, education, through an elaborate system of punishments and rewards – both external and internal, and so on. Pursuit of all that has been given by the world as the ideal or desirable is the essential way of the world. The objects may be varied and may keep changing, but the pursuit is constant. One may attain certain objects along the way, only to find that they were not really enough. So one must find a new pursuit.

But, along the way one pays a heavy price for this pursuit- a constant battle with the unknown, a battle that one is doomed to lose (for what is death if not the ultimate victory of the unknown?). We come to believe that the oversimplified, over-explained, dumbed down, linear, black and white, cause and effect world of knowledge we create is the perfect shield against the incomprehensibly complex and mysterious actual world. By the time we have achieved (if we do) our object in our oversimplified world, we are presented with a new actuality in which what we have achieved or become is no longer what we thought it was, its no longer enough. Time and again, all our explanations, all our ideas, all our attainments and becomings come up short against the brutal actuality. And that is our constant suffering.

Striving is simultaneously our greatest pleasure and our greatest suffering. A paradox!

What is to be done? Why is the known so powerful, so alluring? Is it possible to live without striving? What would it mean to not strive?